Word: coxing
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...this reason, the discovery of young practicing healers like Salome delights Cox, who believes that only people like her can prevent the loss of centuries of knowledge. If he can carry Salome's knowledge to the developed world in the form of plants whose myriad chemical compounds might help combat incurable diseases--notably cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer's--the impetus to save the Samoan rain forest, and all forests, will be that much stronger...
...four young children. The family settled on the island of Savai'i in the isolated village of Falealupo, the westernmost point of Western Samoa, one of the world's poorest countries (average annual per capita income: $100). Here, far from many of the Western influences of neighboring American Samoa, Cox felt he could learn about the plants and the healers who use them before both vanished...
Major technological advances in screening processes have helped Cox and other ethnobotanists immensely. Pharmacologists must analyze between 10,000 and 17,000 chemical compounds before finding one with the potential to be tested for efficacy in humans. Until recently, animal testing and clinical trials of a single drug required an average 12 years of research and cost up to $300 million. But initial screening can now be done in a matter of days without using animals. Molecular biologists are able to isolate enzymes that can trigger human diseases, then expose those enzymes to a plant's chemical compounds...
...about 100 U.S. companies are searching out plants. Drug companies and scientific institutions are collaborating on field research all over the globe, racing to study as many natural substances as possible before they, or the native people who use them, disappear. Some work with the handful of ethnobotanists like Cox to ferret out drug candidates based on their knowledge of indigenous peoples. Others use a broad-brush approach, mass-collecting plants whose chemical compounds might contribute to new drugs...
...contrast to random collecting, Cox feels, ethnobotanical field research provides a far more streamlined way of locating plants that have medical potential. "Indigenous people have been testing plants on people for thousands of years," says Cox. More important, healers may alert ethnobotanists to nuances that random collecting could miss. Take Homalanthus nutans, a rain-forest tree whose bark Samoans have used for centuries as a cure for hepatitis. Cox quickly found that he could not just casually go into the forest and gather the bark because 1) there are two varieties of the tree, and the bark of only...